Below are key excerpts of important news articles on Saudi Arabia being linked to 9/11 by two US senators, the Vatican being placed on the US money-laundering concern list, the Attorney General's claim that the killing of US citizens by government forces without judicial process is "legal," and more. Each excerpt is taken verbatim from the major media website listed at the link provided. If any link fails to function, click here. The most important sentences are highlighted. And don't miss the "What you can do" box below the summaries. By choosing to educate ourselves and to spread the word, we can and will build a brighter future.

Special note: To learn about the crash of a $300,000 police drone right into the SWAT team vehicle it was filming, click here. For a fun, two-minute cartoon showing the illegality of U.S. hostilities abroad, click here. For an in-depth discussion of how researchers Jacques Vallee and Allen Hynek became convinced of a major cover-up of UFOs in the 1960s, click here. To learn how a raw milk seller was tortured in jail, click here. For a great, four-minute video on how to grow vegetables in your window, learn about window farms at this link. For a powerful four-minute video on the right to videotape police actions in public, click here.

For more than a decade, questions have lingered about the possible role of the Saudi government in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, even as the royal kingdom has made itself a crucial counterterrorism partner in the eyes of American diplomats. Now, in sworn statements that seem likely to reignite the debate, two former senators who were privy to top secret information on the Saudis' activities say they believe that the Saudi government might have played a direct role in the terrorist attacks. "I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the September 11th attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia," former Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, said in an affidavit filed as part of a lawsuit brought against the Saudi government and dozens of institutions in the country by families of Sept. 11 victims and others. Mr. Graham led a joint 2002 Congressional inquiry into the attacks. His former Senate colleague, Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a Democrat who served on the separate 9/11 Commission, said in a sworn affidavit of his own in the case that "significant questions remain unanswered" about the role of Saudi institutions. "Evidence relating to the plausible involvement of possible Saudi government agents in the September 11th attacks has never been fully pursued," Mr. Kerrey said. Their affidavits ... are part of a multibillion-dollar lawsuit that has wound its way through federal courts since 2002.

Note: Much evidence exists implicating not only Saudi Arabia, but also Pakistan, Israel and the UK in the 9/11 attacks. Could the purpose behind these high-profile claims from former US senators be to create a "limited hangout" to deflect attention from the real perpetrators, traitors in high positions within the US government? As WantToKnow team member Prof. David Ray Griffin has exhaustively demonstrated, almost all of the evidence for "Islamic hijackers" vanishes on close examination. For more serious questions on 9/11, click here.

The Vatican has for the first time appeared on the U.S. State Department's list of money-laundering centres. It was added to the list because it was considered vulnerable to money-laundering. "To be considered a jurisdiction of concern merely indicates that there is a vulnerability to a financial system by money launderers. With the large volumes of international currency that goes through the Holy See, it is a system that makes it vulnerable as a potential money-laundering center," Susan Pittman of the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, told Reuters. The Vatican Bank, founded in 1942 by Pope Pius XII, has been in the spotlight since September 2010 when Italian investigators froze 23 million euros ($33 million) in funds in Italian banks after opening an investigation into possible money-laundering. The bank said it did nothing wrong and was just transferring funds between its own accounts. The money was released in June 2011 but the investigation is continuing. Two months ago, Italian newspapers published leaked internal letters which appeared to show a conflict among top Vatican officials about just how transparent the bank should be about dealings that took place before it enacted its new laws. The Vatican Bank was formally known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR) and was entangled in the collapse 30 years ago of Banco Ambrosiano, with its lurid allegations about money-laundering, freemasons, mafiosi and the mysterious death of Ambrosiano chairman Roberto Calvi - "God's banker".

Note: For more on the Vatican money-laundering scandal, click here. For speculation on the role of secret societies in all of this, click here.

The U.S. government is legally justified in killing its own citizens overseas if they are involved in plotting terror attacks against America, Attorney General Eric Holder said [on March 5], offering the Obama administration's most detailed explanation so far of its controversial targeted killing program. The Fifth Amendment provides that no one can be "deprived of life" without due process of law. But that due process, Holder said, doesn't necessarily come from a court. "Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process," the attorney general said. The ACLU called Holder's explanation "a defense of the government's chillingly broad claimed authority to conduct targeted killings of civilians, including American citizens, far from any battlefield without judicial review or public scrutiny." "Few things are as dangerous to American liberty as the proposition that the government should be able to kill citizens anywhere in the world on the basis of legal standards and evidence that are never submitted to a court, either before or after the fact," said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's National Security Project. "Anyone willing to trust President Obama with the power to secretly declare an American citizen an enemy of the state and order his extrajudicial killing should ask whether they would be willing to trust the next president with that dangerous power," she said. The ACLU is suing the Obama administration, seeking to have documents regarding the targeted killing program made public.

Note: Attorney General Holder's claim that US citizens can be killed by the government without judicial process clearly violates the U.S. Bill of Rights. In addition to the Fifth Amendment mentioned above that no person shall be held to answer for a crime "without due process of law," the Sixth Amendment states that "the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial."

Attorney General Eric Holder thinks it's legal to kill American terrorism suspects overseas without any judicial review or public notice. It's an astonishing claim to make and a shameful stand for the Obama administration, which came to office pledging to curb such constitutionally shaky excesses. In a speech, Holder essentially offer the "trust us" argument in defense of targeted killings. The guidelines are murky: The military will compile a list of dangerous terrorists including U.S. citizens, hunt them down, and if the host country can't or won't catch the suspect, then the United States will. The example at issue is last year's drone attack that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a New Mexico-born al Qaeda leader. Under Holder's ground rules there is no outside review, court deliberation or explanation of how a suspect makes the kill list. For those critics concerned about oversight or legal caution, he offered this observation: " 'Due process' and 'judicial process' are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process." Holder didn't cite an in-house legal opinion used to justify the policy, which he's refused to release and is the subject of a civil liberties lawsuit. Obama still hasn't closed the Guantanamo Bay gulag as promised. Now he's shielding targeted killings from genuine review. This presidential subversion of rule of law was unacceptable under George W. Bush, and it is unacceptable under Barack Obama.

Note: Attorney General Holder's claim that US citizens can be killed by the government without judicial process clearly violates the U.S. Bill of Rights. In addition to the Fifth Amendment mentioned above that no person shall be held to answer for a crime "without due process of law," the Sixth Amendment states that "the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial."

Several congressional committees want the FBI director to explain why one of his agents ordered the release of Anwar al-Awlaki from federal custody on Oct. 10, 2002, when there was an outstanding warrant for the American Muslim cleric's arrest. The cleric was held by customs agents at JFK International Airport in New York City in early morning of Oct. 10, 2002, until FBI Agent Wade Ammerman ordered his release – even though a warrant for the cleric's arrest on passport fraud was still active.
The warrant was generated by the Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego, which considered the cleric a "tier one" target because of his connections to at least three of the 9/11 hijackers. The passport fraud warrant was described ... as a holding charge that would allow federal investigators to pressure al-Awlaki over his 9/11 contacts. The warrant was pulled by a judge in Colorado, after the cleric entered the U.S.. After al-Awlaki re-entered the U.S. in the fall of 2002 with the FBI's help, the cleric then appeared in a high-profile investigation, in which Agent Ammerman was a lead investigator. Former FBI agents say Ammerman would have needed permission from higher up in the bureau to let al-Awlaki go. Former FBI agents, familiar with al-Awlaki's re-entry in October 2002, say only two scenarios seem to explain what happened. The FBI was tracking the cleric for intelligence or the FBI was working with the cleric and saw him as a "friendly contact."

Note: For further details of the FBI's release of al-Awlaki, click here. How interesting that "al-Awlaki re-entered the U.S. in 2002 with the FBI's help." What may be happening is that individuals like al-Awlaki are CIA assets programmed to be Manchurian Candidates using mind control techniques perfected by intelligence agencies. They are then released to do what they've been programmed to do to forward a hidden shadow-government agenda. Many terrorists and mass murderers may actually be Manchurian Candidates programmed to engage in acts which keep the public in fear. For more on this, click here.

Eight current and former U.S. service members filed a lawsuit [on March 6] alleging they were raped, sexually assaulted or harassed while serving in the military and were retaliated against once they reported the abuse. Among the defendants named in the suit are current and former Defense and Navy secretaries and Marine Corps commandants. "Although defendants testified before Congress and elsewhere that they have 'zero tolerance' for rape and sexual assault, their conduct and the facts demonstrate the opposite: They have a high tolerance for sexual predators in their ranks, and 'zero tolerance' for those who report rape, sexual assault and harassment," according to the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington. The suit outlines a pattern of abuse and portrays, in grim detail, the alleged experiences of the eight female service members -- two former Marine Corps officers, one active duty enlisted Marine, one former enlisted member of the Marine Corps and four former enlisted members of the Navy. "At first it was easy to laugh it off," plaintiff Elle Helmer, one of the former officers, said about her superiors' advances. "When you finally said, you know, I'm really not interested, I'd rather we be friends -- that's when you became the target. They hated you for standing up for yourself," she [said]. The lawsuit alleges Helmer was raped by her superior at his office in March 2006 after a required pub crawl.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on sexual abuse by the powerful, click here.

An Irishman named Diarmuid Martin says the Catholic Church in Ireland has reached a breaking point, a crisis that he says results from the sexual abuse of children by priests and the cover-up by the Church. Martin has provided tens of thousands of pages of evidence against specific priests, and his words and actions carry extraordinary weight. That's because Diarmuid Martin is the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin. There's overwhelming evidence that the Church hierarchy was not only aware of the sexual abuse, but did little about it. The Dublin Archdiocese knew who the predator priests were, even wrote reports about them but then locked up the files. Investigators on a state panel, the Murphy Commission, asked for the files, but the Church refused until Diarmuid Martin became archbishop. The documents revealed that one priest admitted abusing over a hundred children. Another said he abused children twice a month for 25 years. Archbishop Martin believes thousands of children suffered similar fates. Martin: Abuse isn't [just] the actual sexual acts, which are horrendous, but sexual abuse of a child is ... a total abuse of power. It's actually saying to a child, "I control you." And that is saying to the child, "You're worthless."

Note: To see the video of this important piece, click here. For lots more from reliable sources on sexual abuse by the powerful, click here.

Public anger over high gasoline prices is turning to a familiar target - Wall Street. The role of speculative investors in this year's price spike has come under increasing scrutiny in recent weeks, nowhere more so than in Washington. Nearly 70 members of Congress wrote a stern letter Monday to a federal commission that regulates the country's main market for crude oil, demanding that the commission crack down on speculation. President Obama, his energy policies under attack from Republicans, ordered a fresh look at speculation's role in the market on Tuesday. "This is just another example, in my view, of Wall Street playing the casino," said Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough, who signed the letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. "Everyone should be outraged that every time they're filling up their tank, they're paying a premium because of speculation."
How big is that premium? One of the trading commission's five members estimated last month that speculative investors were adding 56 cents to the price of each gallon of gas. As a result, Honda Civic drivers pay an additional $7.39 per fill-up, said Commissioner Bart Chilton. Owners of the Ford F150 pickup pay an extra $14.56. Speculative investors include hedge funds and investment banks that buy contracts for the future delivery of oil but never intend to take possession of the fuel itself. They buy and sell strictly as a financial investment, and their presence in the market has swelled.

Note: For lots more reliable information from the major media on energy manipulations, click here.

A French court has declared the US biotech giant Monsanto guilty of chemical poisoning of a French farmer, a judgment that could lend weight to other health claims against pesticides. In the first such case heard in court in France, the grain grower Paul Francois, 47, said he suffered neurological problems including memory loss, headaches and stammering after inhaling Monsanto's Lasso weedkiller in 2004. He blames Monsanto for not providing adequate warnings on the product label. "It is a historic decision in so far as it is the first time that a [pesticide] maker is found guilty of such a poisoning," Francois Lafforgue, Francois's lawyer, told Reuters. Francois and other farmers suffering from illness set up an association last year to make a case that their health problems should be linked to their use of crop protection products. The agricultural branch of the French social security system says that since 1996, it has gathered farmers' reports of sickness potentially related to pesticides, with about 200 alerts a year. The Francois case goes back to a period of intensive use of crop-protection chemicals in the European Union. The EU and its member countries have since banned a large number of substances considered dangerous.

Note: For key reports from major media sources on corporate corruption, click here.

Corrections Corporation of America ... president and CEO, Damon Hininger, [spoke] in a conference call with analysts ... about the recent purchase (January 2012) of a state prison in Ohio. CCA purchased the Lake Erie Correctional Institution for $72.7 million as part of Governor John Kashich's ... prison privatization program. According to a press release from the state, tax payers will realize an estimated $3 million in annual savings. CCA is not stopping at Ohio though. CCA's Chief Corrections Officer Harvey Lappin, former Director of the Bureau of Prisons who joined CCA less than a year ago, is making similar offers to buy prisons in other states. CCA offers to buy the state's prison with cash up front in exchange for a 20-year management contract plus an assurance that the prison will remain 90% full over that period. In Ohio's case, that meant that for the big chunk of cash up front, it would guarantee payments to CCA for 20 years for inmate per diem, occupancy fee ($3 million/year) and a guarantee that the minimum inmate population would be no less than 90% of capacity. Selling the facility has its downfalls. Once a state has sold its facility, it leaves little opportunity to contract with another prison management company in the event of a dispute or to save money. CCA, in the case of buying a prison, could be in the driver's seat to dictate prison policy to the state.

Note: For revealing reports from major media sources on corruption in the prison-industrial complex, click here.

Silver amalgam fillings, which have plugged American cavities for more than 150 years, have lost their luster over the last couple of decades thanks to the rise of more attractive tooth-colored fillings and concerns about the environmental and health impact of their chief ingredient: mercury. Although use of amalgam fillings has dropped 30 percent in the last decade, according to the American Dental Association, these fillings are still sitting in hundreds of millions of mouths, and dentists continue to fill some 50 million teeth with amalgam each year – especially in children. Mercury, a known neurotoxin, makes up 50 percent (in weight) of amalgam fillings, which also contain silver, copper and tin. For some dentists, toxicologists and advocates, the fact that mercury has been shown to hurt the neurological system, kidneys and other organs is reason enough to keep it out of people's mouths. "When you plant a neurotoxin two inches from the brain, can you say no one is ever harmed from that?" said Charlie Brown, director of Consumers for Dental Choice. His group advocates that dentists be required to disclose the mercury content of amalgam fillings to patients. The buildup of mercury from vapors 24 hours a day, over a lifetime, is the greatest concern, said Boyd Haley, retired professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky. Eighty percent of mercury vapor stays in body tissue for days, months, even years, because the body doesn't have a good system for excreting it, he said.

Note: For an informative article by Dr. Mercola showing that there is no reason to put mercury in your mouth and plenty of risk, click here.

A few years ago researchers in California received widespread attention for showing that dogs can smell cancer on a human's breath. With 99 percent accuracy the canines could detect if a person had lung or breast cancer, beating the best figures from standard laboratory tests. Subsequent studies confirmed the results. Technology startups have hustled to build digital devices that can mimic the dogs' olfactory sense and reduce the need for biopsies and CAT scans. Metabolomx, a 12-person outfit in Mountain View, Calif., [is] bringing a cancer-sniffing device to market. The machine analyzes the breath and its volatile organic compounds, or VOCs–aerosolized molecules that, among other things, determine how something smells. Tumors produce their own VOCs, which pass into the bloodstream. The lungs create a bridge between the bloodstream and airways, so the breath exhaled by a patient will carry the VOC signatures of a tumor if one is present. "It may seem surprising, but it's actually very straightforward," says Paul Rhodes, the co-founder and chief executive officer at Metabolomx. Dr. Peter Mazzone, a lung cancer expert at the Cleveland Clinic, recently published results from a trial he ran with an early version of the Metabolomx machine. He studied 229 people and found that the machine could detect lung cancer more than 80 percent of the time. Just as intriguing, the machine outdid the dogs by distinguishing between different forms of lung cancer with about 85 percent accuracy, giving the doctor insight into whether a patient had an aggressive case.

Note: A machine has 80% accuracy in detecting this lethal disease, while sniffing dogs have 99% accuracy. Which would you rather have? For lots more from reliable sources on promising potential cancer-cure breakthroughs, click here.

Lazy people on social services, a spree of borrowed money. That's how the Greek people are being portrayed. But like Wall Street, the streets of Athens are like a crime scene. The Greek people [are] victims of a fraud and cover-up. Greg Palast is a renowned investigative reporter and author of the new book Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores. Greg, how is it that a bank can lend money to a country that has an economy smaller than Dallas, at a level that is this big? Palast: Greece is a crime scene. Goldman Sachs, beginning in 2001 [or] 2002 ... cut a deal to secretly take euros out of the Greek treasury, convert them to yen, convert them back to euros. This is through some fancy derivative action. Goldman takes a multi-billion dollar loss. The Greek government gets a gain. There's no deficit in the Greek treasury. It's only 3%. The Greek economy looks good. Goldman doesn't take billions of dollars in losses. It's a fraud. They've cut a secret deal to get that money back and then some. Goldman charged about $300, $400 million to pull off this scam.

Note: For lots more from reliable sources on the chicaneries of central banks and financial corporations, click here. For other powerful reporting by journalist Greg Palast, click here.

If you want to avoid sugar, aspartame, trans-fats, MSG, or just about anything else, you read the label. If you want to avoid G.M.O.'s – genetically modified organisms – you're out of luck. They're not listed. You could, until now, simply buy organic foods, which by law can't contain more than 5 percent G.M.O.'s. Now, however, even that may not work. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved three new kinds of genetically engineered (G.E.) foods: alfalfa (which becomes hay), a type of corn grown to produce ethanol), and sugar beets. And super-fast-growing salmon – the first genetically modified animal to be sold in the U.S., but probably not the last – may not be far behind. It's unlikely that these products' potential benefits could possibly outweigh their potential for harm. But even more unbelievable is that the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S.D.A. will not require any of these products, or foods containing them, to be labeled as genetically engineered, because they don't want to "suggest or imply" that these foods are "different." They are arguably different, but more important, people are leery of them. Nearly an entire continent – it's called Europe – is so wary that G.E. crops are barely grown there and there are strict bans on imports (that policy is in danger). Furthermore, most foods containing more than 0.9 percent G.M.O.'s must be labeled.

Note: For an article showing how cozy the relationship between Monsanto and the White House is on this issue, click here.

A World Bank report shows a broad-based reduction in extreme poverty - and indicates that the global recession, contrary to economists' expectations, did not increase poverty in the developing world. The report shows that for the first time the proportion of people living in extreme poverty - on less than $1.25 a day - fell in every developing region between 2005 and 2008. And the biggest recession since the Great Depression seems not to have thrown that trend off course, preliminary data from 2010 indicate. The progress is so dramatic that the world has met the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty in half five years before its 2015 deadline. That is contrary to the World Bank's own expectations. In a year-end 2008 report, the Washington-based development institution warned: "Unemployment is on the rise in industrial countries and poverty is set to increase across low- and middle income countries, bringing with it a substantial deterioration in conditions for the world's most vulnerable." But that did not
happen. Surveys for 2010 show that the proportion of people in the developing world living in extreme poverty fell. That is because of strong growth in countries like Brazil, India and especially China, growth that helped buoy economies in Africa and South America.

Jane the Concussion Killer ended her battle against evil years ago, but See Jane Run is still vanquishing foes. Both are the alter egos of video game advocate Jane McGonigal, whose slow recovery from a head injury was inspiration to turn wellness into a hero-themed game called "SuperBetter." The San Francisco author and game researcher is taking "SuperBetter" global this month, as a free online game and app. With partners, funding and a network of users who have already signed up, she's hoping "SuperBetter" can help people on their own heroic journeys to tackle depression, obesity and other health issues." 'SuperBetter' is fundamentally about a mind shift," McGonigal says. "It's about claiming your power to be in charge of how you spend your time and energy, and focusing it on the things that matter the most to you. Focusing on things that will bring real happiness, real well-being." [She] became a public face with her 2011 best-seller Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Reality Is Broken talks about adopting the stimulating challenges and rewards of video games when tackling real-life problems. "I still believe really strongly that gamers can solve some of the world's toughest challenges, but some of the world's toughest challenges are very personal," she says. "Things like depression and obesity are global challenges."

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